The present invention relates to radio link control of an electronic device, and more particularly, to a method for performing radio link control (RLC) with round trip time (RTT) awareness, and to an associated apparatus.
A conventional portable electronic device implemented according to the related art (e.g., a multifunctional mobile phone, a personal digital assistant (PDA), a tablet, etc) can be very helpful to an end user, and the end user may rely on many applications thereof. In a situation where the end user utilizes the conventional portable electronic device to communicate or access data through a network whose channel quality varies significantly with respect to time, some problems may occur. For example, when the number of negative acknowledgement/acknowledge (NACK, or NAK) status protocol data units (PDUs) received by the transmitting side RLC entity increases due to low channel quality, the number of retransmission operations that should be scheduled typically increases correspondingly. As the retransmission RTT between peer RLC entities may become longer, frequent NACK status PDUs may cause user equipment (UE) such as the conventional portable electronic device to receive several PDUs of the same sequence number (SN), where the later retransmitted data PDUs with the same SN are typically regarded as redundant and discarded by the receiving side RLC entity. Please note that, when NACK status PDUs such as those mentioned above are sent too frequently, the transmitting side RLC entity may be forced to retransmit potentially unnecessary PDUs, which may waste network transmission bandwidth and degrade the throughput performance. Thus, a novel method is required for enhancing RLC of an electronic device.